"The first RC build for the FreeBSD-9.0 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the architectures amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64, and sparc64 are available on most of our FreeBSD mirror sites. One of the many new features in 9.0 we would like to be tested is the new installer, so we encourage our users to do fresh installation on test systems. Alternatively, users upgrading existing systems may now do so using the freebsd-update(8) utility."

Not sure the people who depend on this need new features. The entire bsd thought seems to have been quality over speed and features. It is more intended for server work. The people who have been working on this for maybe decades have done some great work.

Not sure the people who depend on this need new features. The entire bsd thought seems to have been quality over speed and features.

Well, speed is a feature, so is quality. :-)

Honestly, I'm always impressed about the "hidden work" that you'll find when working with FreeBSD. A famous example are the documented and tidy OS sources. But you'll also find that manpages are kept in a very good state - which you'll be thankful for when needing to research something offline, be it a system binary's command options, a kernel interface, a library call, a file format or a maintenance procedure; this kind of feature traditionally appeals to developers.

For "serious production use", FreeBSD doesn't offer a trade-off between speed and stability. You get both. (Note that this statement depends on the kind of your workloads!)

Maintaining features, no matter which ones, deserves honor for those who actually do it.

It is more intended for server work.

FreeBSD is a multi-purpose OS. I agree that its main use is servers, but you can use it as a versatile desktop OS too (as I'm doing exclusively since 4.0). It depends on the hardware you use and the software you want to run. In this regards, FreeBSD provides a powerful foundation for ported applications.